﻿Ten months ago (time flies, huh?) I reviewed a social stats platform called Next Big Sound (NBS). Firstly, I am happy because it is still around. Secondly, its bosses must be happy to have classy partners and users such as Billboard or Topspin. Finally the industry and some (self managed number crunching) artists should be happy about the release of Premier - NBS's premium offer - enabling even more counting and crunching.

First things first though. What's the basic purpose of NBS? As we all know, the world has changed. Selling music has changed. Sharing music has changed. Talking with fans has changed. As an artist or record label, you have to maintain several social media profiles on top of having your good old website. You might have a blog, a myspace account, a facebook page, a last.fm playlist, a youtube channel, a sound cloud. It all depends on your will, your time resources and your social media strategy (we'll be coming to that sort of things in later posts).

And there you go : you post, update, friend fish, tweet, share, accept requests, blog, webcast, comment, submit, stream and so on and so forth. And then what?

That's the time when you realize that - in the end - some stats might be useful. When did people comment and view a lot? Was it after you tweeted a nice reharsal picture? Or when you posted this very long text telling the tour bus story? Or maybe was it about this quick and dirty concert video you shot with your phone? Stats are useful not only regarding the number of plays, views or fans (although we all agree about the basics), they can also be a useful help in detecting what kind of interaction your followers prefer. And thus help you define your priorities when producing the (non audio) content that nurtures your social media presences.

So that's what NBS enables you to see in an friendly and comfy way: stats. The site enables you to follow up to 16 of your social media profiles and generates time graphs picturing the evolution in number of fans, plays, views and comments, be it on a combined basis or platform per platform. Nice.

Now, for the true businessmen, the Premier option is THE dashboard, enabling you to have the complete view on an artist online activities : blog mentions, iTunes album sales, P2P activity, radio plays, geographic and demographic fan base breakdown. Definitely worth a look if you're an artist manager.

It may sound a bit geeky but trust me, it's full of information if you ask yourself the right questions.